Announcement: RedBook v0.5.0 released

Sunday, 16 December 2007

Variables
New Operations
Portable edition
New Development Page

This new beta release of RedBook introduces quite a few changes when it comes to configuration and setup. Here's some highlights…h3. Regexp changes

It is now necessary to enter “proper” regular expressions for :select. Proper means between slashes, like the following:

/Work Day/
/mail/i

I changed this in order to support case-insensitive searches using the i switch. This makes queries much more powerful.

Variables ⇈

A new, interesting feature I decided to introduce in this release is variables. For now you define them inside your rbconfig.yml file, like this:

:var_monday_morning: "monday at 8 am"

:var_friday_evening: "friday at 8 pm"

:var_week_report: ":select :duration :from :%monday_morning :to :%friday_evening"

In this way, every time you type in :%week_report in RedBook, it will expand to: :select :duration :from monday at 8 am :to friday at 8 pm. By the way, completion is supported, so you'll only have to type in something like :%we and hit .

It is possible to define variables as :var_<something> in the rbconfig.yml file and then used them inside RedBook as :%<something>.

New Operations ⇈

Five new operations have been added:

:blank

This will blank your current log after asking you if you really want to do so.

:restore

This operation will overwrite your current log with the last saved backup. Like with the :blank operation, you're asked if you really want to proceed or not.

:archive

By typing :archive, the current log file will be archived to your :archives_folder: directory specified in the rbconfig.yml file (similarly, it is now possible to specify a :backups_folder: for your logs' backup files).

:dataset

A simple operation to display the messages inthe current dataset.

:dump

This operation will dump the output of the last :select operation to a text file. Useful for saving the average, total time and duration of a set of activities.

Portable edition ⇈

Some Windows users will definitely love this. I finally found an easy way to run RedBook confined within the current directory, by using a simple start.bat batch file to set the INPUTRC and HOME variables temporarily to the path to the .inputrc file and the directory of RedBook executable. This makes RedBook 100% portable and suitable to be used on USB sticks &similar.

Get RedBook Portable

New Development Page ⇈

I decided to move the primary RedBook repository from Assembla to Google Code. Why? Well, nothing wrong with Assembla per se, I still think it's an excellent free service to host your public and private projects, but Google Code is faster and offers only the features I need:

Public SVN repository access
Simple-to-use issue tracker
Very nicely developed downloads section, with download counts, and “normal” filenames.

So here's the new RedBook Development Home:

http://code.google.com/p/redbook/

Additionally I also setup a RedBook Support Google Group, so if you have any question concerning the program, you know where to go!